Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [39]
Finley seems not to have been present when, around mid-December, Trumbull turned up at an evening get-together of the club. With the artists drawing from casts he had loaned them, in a room he had provided for them, he apparently wished to reassert the sway of the American Academy over them. As one of the artists, Thomas S. Cummings, recorded the event, Trumbull “took possession” of Finley’s seat. Looking around “authoritatively,” he asked all the artists present to sign the Academy’s student register, which he had brought with him. “The Colonel waited some time,” Cummings wrote, “but receiving neither compliance nor attention, left in the same stately manner he had entered; remarking aloud, that he had left the book for our signatures.” After Trumbull left, the artists gathered in groups to discuss the confrontation. They agreed that they were not his students, and unanimously refused to sign.
Finley led an effort to restore unity between the drawing club and the Academy. Aware that the mutinous artists wanted to remain in the Academy but have a greater say in its management, he discussed the standoff amicably with Trumbull over dinner. A few weeks later, he chaired a three-man committee from the Drawing Association that conferred with a comparable Academy committee. He reported back to the club that the meeting produced a valuable agreement: in the upcoming vote for a new board of directors, Trumbull’s Academy would elect a slate of six artists chosen by the Association—“ensuring us,” he said, “that share in the direction which we desire.”
Finley’s peacemaking, however, may only have touched off total war. The thirty-five Academy members who voted for their new board, on January 10, did elect six artists, but not the six chosen by the drawing club. Surviving explanations of this result differ irreconcilably. In one, Finley misunderstood the committee agreement and thus misrepresented it to the Association. In another, the Academy members betrayed the agreement, voting as if it did not exist. For whatever reason, Trumbull’s Academy chose for its board of directors only two of the artists selected by the club—A. B. Durand, and Finley himself. Both resigned.
Four days after the election, Finley addressed a memorable meeting of the Drawing Association. “We have this evening assumed a new attitude in the community,” he told the members; “our negotiations with the Academy are at an end.” He formally proposed that for the sake of elevating the condition of the arts in the United States they form a new institution, modeled on the Royal Academy. It would differ from Trumbull’s conservative Academy in being geared not to the interests of rich patrons and collectors but of artists, managed not by physicians or politicians but by artists—an institution by artists, for artists: “every profession in society knows best what measures are necessary for its own improvement.”
On January 19, 1826, Finley called to order at his house the first meeting of the National Academy of the Arts of Design. In its earliest form the National Academy consisted of four divisions, each supervised by a prominent artist: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Engraving. At the Antique School, about forty students, male and female, could draw from casts and compete for prizes of gold or silver palettes. Plans were soon made for an annual exhibition, a library of standard European works on art, and weekly lectures on such matters as anatomy and perspective.
The members elected Finley as their first president. Committed to painting full-time, he debated with himself whether to accept. He had long hoped to see in America a republican version of the Royal Academy